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The Loved One (Paperback)

~ (Author) "ALL DAY THE HEAT HAL been barely supportable but at evening a breeze arose in the West, blowing from the heart of the setting sun..." (more)
Key Phrases: Sir Francis, Whispering Glades, Sir Ambrose (more...)

3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (163 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The prolific Waugh--an English novelist and satirist perhaps best known for Brideshead Revisited--described this slim, vicious comedy as "a little nightmare produced by the unaccustomed high living of a brief visit to Hollywood." The setting is the L.A. funeral industry, where Whispering Glades provides deluxe service to deceased stars and their families, and the Happier Hunting Ground does the same for dead pets. (At Whispering Glades, staff must refer to the corpses only as "Loved Ones.") The industry provides a perfect foil for Waugh's deadpan wit--and an apt metaphor for the movie business.

Review

(in full The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy) Satiric novel by Evelyn Waugh, published in 1948. The novel concerns the experiences of a young Englishman living in southern California. It attacks the snobbery of Englishmen and the stupidity, vulgarity, and intellectual sterility of Americans. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

Paperback: 176 pages
Publisher: Back Bay Books; 1999 reprint edition (September 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0316926086
ISBN-13: 978-0316926089
Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 4.8 x 0.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (163 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #93,848 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
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#8 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( W ) > Waugh, Evelyn

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Inside This Book (learn more)

First Sentence:
ALL DAY THE HEAT HAL been barely supportable but at evening a breeze arose in the West, blowing from the heart of the setting sun and from the ocean, which lay unseen, unheard behind the scrubby foothills. Read the first page

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Sir Francis, Whispering Glades, Sir Ambrose, Miss Thanatogenos, Happier Hunting Ground, Guru Brahmin, Cricket Club, Dennis Barlow, Waiting Ones, Aim�e Thanatogenos, Los Angeles, Slumber Room, Ambrose Abercrombie, Orchid Room, Colonel Komstock, Essential Data, Frank Hinsley, Lake Island, Auld Lang Syne, Beauty Parlour, Hindu Love-song, Leicester Scrunch, Miss Poski, Sophie Dalmeyer Krump, United States

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Citations (learn more)

This book cites 17 books:

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh in Front Matter (1), Front Matter (2), and Back Matter
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh in Front Matter (1), Front Matter (2), and Back Matter
Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh in Front Matter (1), Front Matter (2), and Back Matter
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh in Front Matter (1), Front Matter (2), and Back Matter
Officers and Gentlemen by Evelyn Waugh in Front Matter (1), and Front Matter (2)

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100 books cite this book:

Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles by William Alexander McClung on 7 pages
Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise by Alan Warren Friedman on 7 pages
Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England: Volume 1 (Cambridge Studies in the History and Theory of Politics) (v. 1) by Maurice Cowling on 4 pages
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh in Front Matter (1), Front Matter (2), and Back Matter
Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship (Nation Books) by Christopher Hitchens on page 5, page 14, and page 25

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What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

	80% buy the item featured on this page: The Loved One 3.5 out of 5 stars (163) $9.87
	4% buy Decline and Fall 4.3 out of 5 stars (42) $10.19
	4% buy Vile Bodies 4.6 out of 5 stars (26) $10.19
	2% buy Brideshead Revisited 4.4 out of 5 stars (118) $9.74

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satire(10)

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literature in english(4)

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death and dying(2)

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Customer Reviews

163 Reviews

5 star:		(47)
4 star:		(47)
3 star:		(33)
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3.5 out of 5 stars (163 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Waugh's Blackest, Funniest Moment, November 13, 2004

By	Bill Slocum (Norwalk, CT USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

How brilliant an author can be when he doesn't give the slightest hoot about any of the characters he breathes life into! "The Loved One" is a brutal read, but those who read it will uncover a fabulous entertainment precisely because of its total lack of sentiment.

Failed poet Dennis Barlow has left his native England and, much to the embarrassment of his fellow ex-pat Brits, taken work as the front man for a Los Angeles pet cemetery, Happier Hunting Grounds. While making funeral arrangements for his former living companion, a scriptwriter-turned-suicide, Barlow meets and romances a cosmetician at Whispering Glades, the in-place for dead celebs who crave some final status before they go. Using some recycled poetry from the likes of Shelley and Shakespeare (he's long since run out of gas on his own), Barlow manages to woo young Aimee Thanatogenos from under the attentions of chief Whispering Glades undertaker Mr. Joyboy. But will Joyboy play fair with his rival?

One confusing thing people often say about "The Loved One" is that it's a Catholic satire on the materialist way people handle the subject of death. Waugh was a devout Catholic, and a satirist, but it strikes me that "The Loved One" is rather agnostic in tone, without a religious character or idea presented as buttress against the nihilist vision of the book. I don't think people are wrong to be disturbed by it that way. "The Loved One" satirizes the non-religious nature of death as memorialized at Whispering Glades, but not so much with the suggestion of an alternative as with the notion that talk of non-sectarian "better worlds" is like whistling in a vacuum and, at best, frivolous. After a few reads, my sense of "A Loved One" is that it could be a book written by a Lutheran, a Jew, or an atheist. I could be wrong, but I don't think so.

The fact that the novel still manages to be entertaining even as it runs against the grain of Waugh's moral and spiritual beliefs is testament to the author's brilliance. It's one thing to write the Crete passage in "Officers And Gentlemen," where the awful carnage of the battle is presented with a sense of some higher significance. When Barlow returns home one day and finds his old friend swinging from the rafters in a noose, we are told "his reason accepted the event as part of the established order." Barlow is an artfully rendered protagonist precisely because he is so lacking in character or decency. He is a thorough clod. Readers tackling "The Loved One" for the first time are well-advised not to make the mistake of caring for any of the characters in it, especially not him.

My favorite part of the book is the opening, where we meet Barlow and his companion, the aging screenwriter-turned-hack-publicist Francis Hinsley. "Kierkegaard, Kafka, Connolly, Compton Burnet, Sartre, 'Scottie' Wilson. Who are they? What do they want?" asks Hinsley over sodas-and-whisky, taking in the literary "new breed" which was by then either dead or collecting pensions. There's a wonderful sense of comic disengagement, the idea of Hollywood as some Somerset Maugham outpost in deepest Africa, and the Tinseltown focus is something we lose as the novel goes on, which I missed.

The rest of the book is a clever forum for Waugh's brilliant observations and off-handed commentary about a life lived in a world without standards. Aimee notes at one point: "Once you start changing a name, you see, there's no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better."

Or the infamous single episode where we meet Mr. Joyboy's mother, who had "small angry eyes, frizzy hair, pince-nez on a very thick nose, a shapeless body, and positively insulting clothes." Who says adverbs ruin good writing?

As I said, "The Loved One" is not for the fainthearted. I almost wish my edition didn't come with a Charles Addams cover illustration; it sets the wrong expectation. This is a "fiendishly entertaining" read only for those who go into it not expecting to be fiendishly entertained. It's for the dour pessimist in us all. But it's definitely one of the best novels ever written, precisely because of its unremitting focus on the things mankind naturally would turn away from if it could, and the dark amusement it finds from such exploration serves as a kind of triumph of the literary imagination we can still celebrate today.

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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Humoring the Dead, October 10, 2005

By	R. Chaffey "beckahi" (Chicago) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is only the second Evelyn Waugh novel I have read, and I find myself liking him all the more. Waugh is famous for his scathing satire and witty play with words; he can craft characters who are odious even to him and dispose of their problems with ease and brillance. Such is the case with "The Loved One", a wry novel that skewers everything from the upper class to religion to funerary practices, all while drawing laughs and smiles from the reader.

Dennis Barlow is a young Englishman living in southern California. He fashions himself to be a poet, but as the Muse has left him dry, he finds employment at the Happier Hunting Grounds a.k.a. the local pet cemetery. When his mentor and roommate commits suicide, it is up to Dennis to arrange his funeral at the chic and studied Whispering Glades - not so much a cemetery as an entire business devoted to the dead and their 'waiting ones'. Dennis finds himself enthralled with not only Whispering Glades, but with Aimee, a young cosmetician who works there. He fights for her attention with plagarized poems while her other suitor, Mr. Joyboy the wonder mortician, delivers smiling corpse after corpse for her to paint in hopes of winning her love.

After introducing readers to this integral triangle of the book, the novel is then devoted to Aimee's struggles to choose which man she should marry. This questioning leads to some fatal consequences, that are indecorously disposed of through Waugh's irreverent creation Dennis Barlow. "The Loved One" is tirelessly funny, and searchingly honest. Evelyn Waugh examines the farce humans play when a loved one dies with heretofore unknown wit and alacrity that may have failed under lesser hands.

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Before "Six Feet Under" there was "The Loved One", July 1, 2006

By	Charles S. Houser (Binghamton, NY) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

In this brilliant little satirical novel, Evelyn Waugh takes on Hollywood, the British expatriate community in Los Angeles, the death care industry, romantic love, filial love, sexism (perhaps without knowing it), and American attitudes toward success, death, foreigners, art, their pets, suicide, morality, newspaper advice columns, and religion (both ancient and new-fangled). No tombstone goes unturned. Rather than summarize the plot, let me just say that the title of the book, which is an obvious reference to the standard funteral director's euphemism for a deceased person, actually takes on another meaning as well, especially as the two main male characters (Dennis Barlow, an British would-be poet newly arrived to Los Angeles, and Mr. Joyboy, a successful local embalmer) vie for the affections of the same young lady, Aimee Thanatogenos. The novel could be seen on one level as the story of her journey from being the men's love object (desired, but never really "seen") to becoming a "loved one" in the death care industry sense of the word.

At the same time I was reading the book, I rented Tony Richardson's marvelous all-star film (1965). Both are equally wicked and satirical, but Richardson's film, in its exploitation of American anxieties about nuclear war, has more in common with Stanley Kubric's "Dr. Strangelove" than with Waugh's 1948 novel. In any case, seeing the movie didn't spoil the ending of the book. Both are brilliant and LOL fun.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Death Rites in the Cross Hairs
"The Loved One" the novella by Evelyn Waugh caused quite a sensation when it appeared in 1948. This satiric piece which jabbed fun at the Hollywood fascination with the beauties... Read more

Published 3 months ago by John F. Rooney

3.0 out of 5 stars Gallows Humor
One of my favorite stories about Evelyn Waugh finds him at a swank Parisian dinner party. After rudely belittling a helpless French intellectual with his characteristic... Read more

Published 9 months ago by John Murphy

5.0 out of 5 stars Dark
This is a satiric and a dark humored novel; it's very well written, but I found it hard to laugh at the characters, sensing more to their misery then I did of the humor of... Read more

Published 12 months ago by Maritsa

5.0 out of 5 stars THE BOOK THAT BECAME THE MOVIE WITH SOMETHING TO OFFEND EVERYONE
Evelyn Waugh was a rebel.

In the novel, a young English poet, Dennis Barlow, goes to Los Angeles to live with his uncle, Sir Francis Hinsley, who works at a film... Read more

Published 15 months ago by Michael P. Naughton

4.0 out of 5 stars good value
Had a hard time finding this book to read for my bookclub. found it paid a penny(more for shipping than book) Well worth it as I didnt have to struggle to find and the book was in... Read more

Published 18 months ago by Francislstillings

4.0 out of 5 stars A Quirky Comedy
It would seem preparation for funeral services would be a difficult service for which to create a farce. Read more

Published 19 months ago by JMack

5.0 out of 5 stars This Book Influenced me to become a Funeral Director
In the past year I have gone back to this book
and discovered it influenced my choice of a career in Funeral Service. Read more

Published 22 months ago by R.Brian Burkhardt

3.0 out of 5 stars I don't know... I wasn't impressed
While "The Loved One" was amusing enough and stylistically attractive, I just wasn't that impressed with it. Read more

Published on August 22, 2007 by L. Toll

5.0 out of 5 stars Delightful!!
I've had this book on my shelves for years and re-read it yesterday. Found it delightful and laughed out loud at some things. Read more

Published on March 15, 2007 by A reader

4.0 out of 5 stars Classic Waugh
The Loved One is classic Waugh. Thought provoking, rather irrevent and good for an afternoon's belly laugh. Read more

Published on January 18, 2007 by Thomas Gordon

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